Monday, June 27, 1927: New York City
Coney Island
We could smell the night’s salt air coming off the water as we drove along Ocean Parkway towards the beach and towards the light. For thirty minutes the glow had been visible, emanating from the ground up, acting like a magical magnetic ray pulling our LaSalle convertible through the darkness of Brooklyn towards the ocean.
Stanwyck, a Brooklyn girl, and I were on our way to meet one of Brooklyn’s finest sons, Waite “Schoolboy” Hoyt. Our destination, a midnight show in the grand ballroom atop the Loews Theater on Coney Island.
I’ve never been a person of deep faith, and there’s not a whole lot in this world that I’m certain about, especially since the Great War, but I am sure of this: one can never say he’s truly experienced New York City until he’s driven through the heart of this town in a convertible after dark.
Driving down Central Park West, framed by the elegant apartment buildings on one side and the tall trees that line Central Park on the other, rolling down Broadway, past the buildings that tower over the Great White Way, each one acting as a giant pedestal for billboards lit up to appear like outdoor movie screens — but in bright colors, instead of just the black and white of the silver screen — motoring through downtown, then across Manhattan and over the Brooklyn Bridge.
In a convertible, driving over the Brooklyn Bridge feels like you’re driving up to heaven — you rise above the East River, suspended in midair, bathed by the flood lights from atop the spans, and bordered by darkness on both sides — while behind you the eternal flame of the city falls away.
I’ll drive in a convertible in New York City in practically any weather. Even snow. Last winter, Steven, Bill Powers and I created the “Christmas Convertible Caravan”: three convertibles, driving around town on the night before Christmas with our tops down in a snowfall, the heating systems of our cars heavily augmented by multiple blankets, multiple broads and multiple bottles of booze.
From 11 p.m. till 4 a.m. our convertible caravan sledded on — driving, drinking, nightclub dancing, and then driving and drinking some more. We closed out Christmas Eve on a steep hill in Central Park, using garbage can lids as makeshift sleds. The entire night felt as if we were living inside a giant snow globe, a priceless souvenir of the greatest city in the world.
Tonight, though, there’s no caravan, and no need for multiple blankets, or multiple broads. It’s just Stanwyck and me, driving in Steven’s car towards the ocean on a hot summer’s evening. Even with the top down we’re both glistening.
We take the long right-hand turn off Ocean Parkway and there it is, a brilliant cacophony of amusement parks, arcades, carnival barkers, freak shows, restaurants, hot dog stands, nightclubs, a million light bulbs, and the beach. Coney Island.
As we drive onto Surf avenue, we slow down to maneuver through the pedestrian traffic. Teenagers in groups and couples of all ages are out. Many of them are tied to balloons, or carrying cotton candy and stuffed animals. Almost everyone is laughing with the night. As our car floats through the crowd, Stanwyck grabs my arm and slides closer to me with the excitement of a child being carried by her father into the circus. And Coney just may be the biggest circus in the world.
Suddenly there’s the violent roar of thunder and screaming. We look up to see the brand new Cyclone rollercoaster hurtling down, directly towards our car. It’s falling so fast it seems like there’s no way it can stay on its tracks — and then with a rush and a scream it darts off like a serpent, back into the darkness. The Cyclone just opened this weekend and the newspapers say there’s never been a ride like it — it’s eight stories tall, and falls at speeds of more than 60 miles per hour. The line to ride the Cyclone goes on for blocks. According to the radio, since this morning people have been waiting three hours for their chance at a two-minute thrill.
Next we roll past the giant, five-story tall electric pinwheels of Luna Park, past the crowds at Nathan’s Hot Dog stand, past Steeplechase Park, down to the west end of the amusement area, to the Half Moon Hotel, which just opened a few weeks ago. We leave the car with the valet and then head out to the boardwalk, walking east. It’s only 10 p.m. and we’re not meeting Hoyt until midnight.
We walk into the park and the Pavilion of Fun to ride the mechanical horses over the steeplechase course. In our race, Stanwyck, her white cotton dress tucked beneath her legs, finishes a close second. I’m a distant third, my horse a mechanical nag.
Then we see a booth with metal milk bottles piled atop each other into a 10-bottle pyramid, stacked like bowling pins. They’re on tables about 40 feet away from the booth’s front counter. The Carny dares us to take a throw to see if we can knock down the bottles and win a prize. I smile and Stanwyck whispers to me: “Tommy, let’s steal that!” while pointing to a giant stuffed tiger.
The size of our potential prize is based on how much we’re willing to pay: a nickel (the cost of every ride on Coney), a dime, a quarter, or for the big cat, fifty cents.
Stanwyck rubs my pitching arm and says, “This will be like going hunting in the zoo.”
Maybe.
My first fifty cent attempt to knock down the bottles is on the mark, as good a pitch as I can throw. It hits the middle two of the four bottom milk bottles — but after the explosion, somehow one bottom bottle on the right remains standing.
Just another game that’s rigged. That last bottle must be adhered to the pedestal. So much for getting the tiger.
I beg off taking any more throws. “I need to be careful,” I explain to Stanwyck. “This is exactly how Schoolboy ruined his arm for a month last year. Hoyt was throwing balls in a booth at a town fair outside of Philly when he strained it. It was so bad that our manager sent him to a bonesetter way up in Rochester, New York, for an incredibly painful adjustment session — twisting and yanking his arm — and then more treatment that involved our trainer rubbing this ridiculously foul-smelling, skin-scalding cream into his arm, night and day. It was so bad that — ”
Stanwyck cuts me off.
“Get the tiger.”
I ask the Carny for another ball. He hands it to me and resets the bottles.
This time I throw it as hard as I can, nicking the outside corner of the planted bottle, breaking its mooring and sending it skidding across the bottom row in a way that causes all the bottles to cascade down.
“You should be pitchin’ for Brooklyn with an arm like that!” yells the Carny, both amazed and none too pleased to part with the tiger.
“The Robins? What about the Yankees?” shouts Stanwyck.
“The Yankees? They don’t need no pitchin’, not with Ruth, Gehrig and Lazzeri. The Robins, they need arms. They got ‘nuttin!”
He has a point.
Stanwyck takes the tiger with her on every ride.
At 11 p.m. we walk back across Surf Avenue to the Boston Hotel to catch some of the “Sepia Show.” It’s an all-black revue with a dance band in a second floor nightclub that seats about 150 — a “black and tan” club, with an audience that tonight is a third black and two-thirds tan. The music is hot, and so is the room. Stanwyck sweetly asks a couple at one of the front tables if they’ll hold her tiger for her, and then we take to the dance floor. Five minutes later there’s so much sweat on us that you can see through our clothes.
“I need a smoke and a swim,” Stanwyck says. She thanks the couple for looking after her tiger and we walk back out onto the boardwalk and then onto the beach. The air is still, and a fog has descended, muting the garish lights of Coney into an incandescent mist. No shadows, just silhouettes.
We’re standing in front of a bathhouse for coloreds, and I suggest that we walk down the beach a bit, past the Jewish cabanas, over to the Irish section where we can rent a couple of bathing suits and take a quick swim. Stanwyck instead starts walking towards the water. She sees a colored couple about my age on the beach, and just as she did at the Sepia Show, she asks if they’ll watch her tiger. Then she takes off her dress, and wearing only her bra and underpants runs into the water and swims out past the waves.
The couple holding the tiger shake their heads. They seem like a nice couple. “I’ll be back for these and the tiger in a couple of minutes,” I tell them, as I take off my jacket, shirt and pants. “If you don’t steal my wallet, there’s an honest five in it for you.” They both smile. “We’ll be here. And you don’t have to pay us to watch this show,” the man says.
I dive in and swim after Stanwyck, who is surprisingly far out. She turns and swims back over to me. “Hold this, would you,” she says, as she hands me her bra.
“Anything else?” I ask her.
“Nothing,” she says as she kisses me.
On our way back from the beach, Stanwyck insists that before we go up to the ballroom, we first stop at the exhibit of Dr. Couney’s Premature Babies across the street from the Freak Show. Even at this late hour, there’s a line for both establishments. Inside Dr. Couney’s there are close to a hundred premature infants in metal and glass containers, miraculously being kept alive by Dr. Couney and his staff.
We pay our quarter apiece and are given a tour and mini-lecture by a nurse in a crisply pressed white lab coat. She tells us that this is the only facility of its kind in the United States. Every day, she says, tens of babies in New York City, hundreds of babies in America and thousands of babies around the world are born prematurely and die because no hospitals in America, and only a couple in London and Paris, have the proper facilities or know-how to care for premature infants. Every day babies from New York and beyond are brought to Coney Island by desperate parents who turn them over to Dr. Couney for months, until they’re strong enough to go home.
Medical care for the premature babies is free, in exchange for the right to put them on exhibit. The nurse tells us that even though thousands of people line up to see Dr. Couney’s Coney Island exhibition every day, it’s not a profitable venture because all of the money we paid for our tickets goes towards the cost of the infants’ care, which can run as much as $20 a day for each baby.
I whisper to Stanwyck that the room is like an aquarium, with babies instead of fish, and turn expecting to see her smile, only to see tears. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, perhaps unconsciously, she is shaking her head “No,” while staring into a case filled with undersized infants.
I put my arm around her, but her body is no longer soft. It’s stiff. She doesn’t want to be touched or comforted.
Afterwards, back on the beach, finally smoking that cigarette she had wanted an hour ago, Stanwyck is staring out at the water. She tells me about how, four years ago, when she was fifteen and just starting out as a dancer, she had gotten pregnant. Obviously, she had no way of caring for a child. Both her parents were dead. When she was only four she had seen her mother die after falling off a trolley car. Her father abandoned her and her brother. She loved her brother more than anyone else in the world, they were practically twins, but as orphans they were separated and lived in a series of foster homes, often in the same neighborhood. They would see each other on the street and at school, but they never slept in the same home again. For a time she lived with a much older sister who was in a vaudeville show. At age fourteen she started working full time, first as a switchboard operator. She had a couple of other jobs and then became serious about dancing. A short while later, she had gotten pregnant. There was no way she could survive her already precarious life and care for a child. So she didn’t have it. But the doctor had botched things. She can never have a child.
As she tells her story to the ocean, she isn’t asking for pity. And she still isn’t asking to be comforted. She isn’t asking for anything. She never does.
As I listen, I find myself understanding for the first time that her pain is part of her magic. It explains her independence and her nighttime behaviors, her need for a different kind of freedom, something deeper than just some silly flapper’s desire to play the role of a bad girl. Offstage, Stanwyck never plays a role. She just is. Only nineteen, she’s already her own woman. Most never get there.
Whenever I’m with Stanwyck remarkable things just seem to happen. But tonight I realize that, actually, they don’t just happen. They happen because Stanwyck wants them to happen.
Sometimes it involves me. Sometimes it doesn’t. Tonight, so far, it does.
At about 1 a.m. we arrive fashionably late to the ballroom, looking like we’ve just gotten out of bed — if our bed was in a shower, that is.
The ballroom is on the sixth floor with a balcony overlooking the boardwalk and the ocean. It’s a large, airy, all-white room with chandeliers, two dozen banquet tables arrayed around a wooden dance floor, an all-white bandstand, and an all-white band.
At the front desk the maître d’ sternly informs us that the ballroom is closed for a private party, in a manner that makes it clear we are not invited. But I assure him we were. “We’re the invited guests of a Mr. Waite Hoyt.” I turn to Stanwyck to ask her if she can see where Schoolboy’s sitting, but she’s already gone, tiger in tow, halfway across the dance floor. She’s spotted Hoyt.
Actually she’s spotted Ruth, who’s sitting with Hoyt, along with Herb Pennock, Bob Meusel, Joe Dugan and a dozen broads, most of them pros, the others skilled amateurs. This is not what either Stanwyck or I were expecting. Schoolboy stands up to greet us with a smile like a lighthouse. He’s dressed as if he’s going to join Jay Gatsby for a party at his estate. All of the boys at the table are looking smart, in ties and jackets. Despite having sand in my shoes, pockets and hair, I’m looking smart because I’ve walked in with Stanwyck.
“Duck Eye!” shouts Ruth when he sees me. He’s got one girl on his lap and two others draped over him, one on either side. The other boys have settled for just two girls apiece. “You’re just in time!”
Schoolboy comes from around the table to shake my hand, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “He’s quite right, old chap,” he says in a comically affected British accent. “We were about to send out a bulletin on your behalf — what I believe you Yanks call an A.P.B., a code of distress to the constables and, of course, the Coast Guard, just in case you’d been lost at sea.”
He’s actually quite good at it. No surprise. His father was a longtime vaudeville comedian and Schoolboy not only grew up in the wings but also spent more than a little time on stage himself as a kid. Since making a name for himself in the big leagues, during the off-season he regularly plays the vaudeville circuit. Indeed, if Hoyt hadn’t been a pitching prodigy — so good that John McGraw signed him to a Giants contract when he was only 15, earning him the nickname, “Schoolboy” — he might be making his living on the stage, instead of on the mound.
Not letting go of my hand, Schoolboy pulls me close to him and starts talking to me like a gangster: “Of course, had we known you was wit’ dat dame, we’d have gone lookin’ for you ourselfs.” Then, seamlessly, in a instant, England’s Lord Waite Hoyt reappears. “But enough of this trifling about searches and those lost at sea. Of course we mourn those brave souls. Yet, somehow, Bob Shawkey made it back from the high seas and the Great War. Funny how there’s no rhyme or reason to life, is there? But then, of course, God is dead. Or maybe God’s just lost at sea?” Lord Hoyt pauses to consider the possibility. “Either way, I believe it’s time for me to sing, old chap.” And with that, he takes his leave of me and walks up to the bandstand.
“Ladies and Gentlemen. Madames and Messieurs. Meine Herren und some herring,” he announces to quiet the room. “We all know what love at first sight feels like. Some of us might even be feeling it tonight.” And with that he glances over at our table and Stanwyck. I wonder if he’s talking about himself.
“Tonight I’d like to dedicate a song to my own first love at first sight. It happened in a little town north of here, called Boston. Back in 1919.” Schoolboy begins to sing, and the band follows him.
It had to be you.
It had to be you.
Schoolboy starts walking around the circumference of the dance floor. His voice is good enough to carry the room.
I wandered around and finally found,
the somebody who,
Could make me be true.
Could make me be blue.
Or even be glad, just to be sad,
thinking of you.
By the time Hoyt arrives at our table, his old Red Sox teammate, the Babe, is actually blushing.
Some others I’ve seen,
might never be mean.
Might never be cross,
or try to be boss.
But they wouldn’t do.
Schoolboy gently peels each of the three girls off of Ruth, who’s now painfully worried that Hoyt’s going to end up in his lap.
For nobody else gave me a thrill.
With all your faults, I love you still.
It had to be you.
Wonderful you.
It had to be you.
And with that he abandons Ruth and takes Stanwyck by the hand, and the two of them begin to float across the dance floor. She’s better, but he can dance. Goddamn him. Schoolboy can really dance.
They return and he gallantly hands her back to me, with a nod of thanks. Then he turns back to Ruth, whose moon-sized face grows bigger than ever, his eyebrows flying up to his hairline. He puts his big paw out to warn Hoyt not to come too close. Gracefully, Schoolboy keeps his distance.
For nobody else gave me a thrill.
With all your faults, I love you still.
It had to be you.
Wonderful you.
It had to be you.
The standing ovation is led by Ruth — who turns to our table and growls, “Let’s go ride the Cyclone.”
We leave the ballroom, head downstairs and pile into three cars that Ruth and the boys have waiting for them. Then we’re driven the two blocks to the Cyclone. The cars are necessary because a walk with Ruth would take us half an hour, between the handshakes, conversations and autographs.
Hoyt gets out of the Babe’s car and walks up to the ticket booth. He tries to hand the gal behind the counter a $100 dollar bill that the Babe’s given him for the occasion, but she doesn’t know what to do with it. She asks for her boss, who thinks it’s some kind of a joke until Hoyt brings him over to the Babe’s car.
Part of what makes the Babe the Babe is that he doesn’t just callously cut a line. Once our reservation is secured, Ruth takes a few minutes to talk with the people he’s putting out, people he knows have been waiting in line for a long time. He tells them that he’s bought them all a ride. And he adds, apologetically, “A couple of you wonderful fans have asked me for my autograph. It wouldn’t be fair for me to sign for just some of you, but I promise if you write me at the stadium and tell me you were in line tonight, I’ll mail you an autograph as soon as I get your letter! It’s hard for me to get out and do something like this during the daytime, so I surely appreciate your letting me jump the line!”
Hoyt leans in between Stanwyck and me and says, “The clubhouse boys will be working overtime signing those autographs next week.”
The Cyclone’s manager opens up a side gate and Ruth, Pennock, Meusel, Dugan and Hoyt — each now down to one girl apiece — and Stanwyck and I (and her tiger) are quickly locked into the Cyclone. Ruth is sitting in the front seat with the ugliest of his three girls from the ballroom.
As the roller coaster cars slowly start up the tracks, Stanwyck grabs my arm just the way she did four hours ago, as we were driving along Surf Avenue. Up and up we go. Then suddenly — we’re all screaming. It’s as if we’ve fallen off a cliff, trapped inside a thunderstorm. “Clack! Clack! Clack! Clack! Clack! Clack!!!!!!” Then, “Whack!”
God help us! We’re part of a giant metal whip, cracking back over its mid-air path! I’m not scared that the cars are going to fly off the tracks. I’m scared the wooden scaffolding that holds the Cyclone up is going to blow apart.
After less than two minutes it’s over. The Cyclone crawls to a stop. All of us sit there, spent. I feel like I’ve just been on the losing end of a first-round, heavyweight knockout. Stanwyck whispers to me, “It’s like sex.”
As we stagger out of the Cyclone, all of us are shaking our heads. We’ve never felt anything like it. Immediately outside the gate, the ugly girl who was stuffed into the front car with Ruth barely makes it to a trash can in time.
And then there’s Ruth. He’s not budging.
“Comon!” he hollers to the people standing in line. “Get in!” The other cars quickly fill up, and Ruth heads back up to the nighttime sky. The rest of us pass around a pack of cigarettes. “Three,” says Pennock. “Four,” says Dugan. “Four if we’re lucky,” says Hoyt.
Schoolboy then turns to Stanwyck to explain their code. “When the Babe first came up to the bigs, he was such a rube that he used to ride the hotel elevators, up and down, for hours at a time. Just plain elevators. For hours.” The Brooklyn boy looks at the Brooklyn girl, and they both shake their heads at the thought of such utter naivety. Schoolboy says, “This could be a long night.”
“I think that’s our cue to go home,” Stanwyck unapologetically says to the boys. And with that, she and her tiger turn to head back to the Half Moon hotel.
And that’s how we left them. Standing outside the Cyclone, swapping smokes and a flask, waiting for the Babe to finish riding up and down, in and out of the nighttime Coney Island sky.
- Coney Island
- Half Moon Hotel
- NEW YORK TIMES, August 12, 2011: “Zooming in on Coney Island, 1929” (Remarkable interactive photo of Coney Island from 1929.)
